Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “Web 2.0”, and while the term has been differently used, I have boiled it down to the recent explosion of user-generated content (thus the focus on prosumption). This past summer, O’Reilly has declared another new era, what he calls “Web Squared”:

“There’s […] a qualitative change happening as the Web becomes more closely integrated with the real world via sensor-based smart phone applications. Web Squared is another way of saying “Web meets World.”

We can boil this phrase (if one wants to even preserve it) down to a fundamentally important trend: the increased blurring of the digital and material worlds. This trend has been discussed in some of my previous posts on “geotagging” and “location awareness”. These tools, often used via “smart”, GPS-enabled mobile phones, track and display users’ geographic locations in many different ways, such as on one’s Facebook or Twitter accounts. I have argued that (1-macro) these technologies are the further intrusion of capitalism into increasingly intimate aspects of our selves and lives, and (2-micro) the documentation of one’s location is a new task of performing the self and identity, fueling the ‘digital culture of narcissism’.

In addition to “geotagging” and “location awareness”, another important trend is that of “augmented reality”: the merging of material reality with digital information, as well as the augmentation of digitality with materiality (note that this later trend is not focused on by either O’Reilly or the Wikipedia article). Google’s Street View gives us this implosion (real-time versions of this already exist [video]) and Google’s Picasa can now recognize billions of people’s faces and tag them automatically. Video games have been trending towards the addition of materiality, most dramatically when the Nintendo Wii took the market by storm by making the digital game play less about pushing buttons, and more about traditional material-world movements. Sony has announced that it will also release a “motion controller” for the Playstation 3 system and Microsoft is creating a motion controller for the Xbox 360 that will also incorporate a camera, depth sensor and a microphone, creating a video game experience where one does not have to push any buttons at all.

This speaks to a fundamental way of conceptualizing and theorizing the Internet specifically, and spaces and places generally: that digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other. For example, social networking sites (e.g., MySpace, Facebook) are not separate from the physical world, but rather they have everything to do with it, and the physical world has much to do with digital socializing. No longer can we think of a “real” world opposed to being “online”. Instead, we need to think with a paradigm that centers on the implosion of the worlds of bits and atoms into the augmented reality that has seemingly become ascendant. ~nathan

[...] realm as separate from material reality opposed to a view of the material and digital as enmeshed (as I have argued they are, especially for young people). The extent to which social media awareness campaigns are actually [...]

[...] standpoint in a world of physical books versus those developing in an augmented world (that is, the massive blurring of the physical and digital that is occurring). As the physical-only is being replaced by the augmented, the physical-only folks react by [...]

[...] onto the physical world [examples of where it is now, and where it might be going]. However, I have argued that augmented reality can also refer to our digital profiles becoming increasingly implicated with [...]

[...] Yes, even a CGI-filled big-budget glowing Disney spectacle can provide opportunity for theorization. Of the recent Internet-themed blockbusters – namely, Avatar (2009); The Social Network (2010) – Tron: Legacy (2010) best captures the essence of this blog: that the digital and the physical are enmeshed together into an augmented reality. [...]

[...] world, and our offline interactions are influenced by digitality. The reality in which we exist is increasingly augmented by atoms and bits, and this augmented reality is inhabited by an augmented cyborg self (opposed to the dualistic [...]

[...] conceptual leap that the digital sphere is not this separate space like The Matrix but instead that reality is augmented. I’ve been through the argument enough times on this blog that I’ll just refer you to [...]

Is it Bad Manners to be a Cyborg? » OWNI.eu, News, Augmented — April 28, 2011

[...] leap that the digital sphere is not this separate space like The Matrix but instead that reality is augmented. I’ve been through the argument enough times on this blog that I’ll just refer you to [...]

[...] which I seek to describe. A quick catch-up: I initially laid out the idea of augmented reality here; expounded on its opposite, what I call digital dualism, here; and fellow Cyborgology editor PJ [...]

[...] which I seek to describe. A quick catch-up: I initially laid out the idea of augmented reality here; expounded on its opposite, what I call digital dualism, here; and fellow Cyborgology editor PJ [...]

The Faux-Vintage Photo » OWNI.eu, News, Augmented — June 2, 2011

[...] follows the trend of what I have labeled “augmented reality”: the fact that physical and digital are increasingly imploding into each other. And by making our [...]

bernardleckning.com / Notes on the concept of augemented reality — June 18, 2011

[...] Instead they offer the concept of augmented reality as a way of sensitising us to the fact “that digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.” The first question I often think of when theorists offer dialectical explanations or [...]

Social Media & Political Underdogs | The Social Media People and how social media can benefit charities — July 14, 2011

[...] friendly with Zuckerberg and Facebook, it seems that the presidential campaign has found itself augmented by and reliant upon social media tools; some of the very same tools many of us use, like Facebook, [...]

[...] friendly with Zuckerberg and Facebook, it seems that the presidential campaign has found itself augmented by and reliant upon social media tools; some of the very same tools many of us use, like Facebook, [...]

[...] social media users already know: that the digital and physical are increasingly enmeshed into an augmented reality. The report goes further to illuistrate that not only are digital and physical networks enmeshed, [...]

[...] we have been growing in readership, and 2) we are embarking on a new, ongoing, project to situate Augmented Reality (AR) amongst other theories of society’s relationship to technology. Today I want to [...]

[...] example of how “digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other” (Jurgenson 2009). In this case, the widespread proliferation of texting and its seeming ubiquitousness in daily [...]

[...] new opportunities of the Web Squared in which we all live today and from which it is clear that digital and material realities constantly co-construct each other. That is why, since I finished my PhD dissertation, the obvious has imposed itself on me: the [...]

My Digital Dualist Fallacy — July 5, 2013

[...] the thesis proposed by Nathan Jurgenson and his colleagues at the Cyborgology blog. Starting in 2009 Jurgenson began to promote a concept he called augmented reality. Jurgenson holds it up as an [...]

Towards a New Social Economy | e-Selves — August 23, 2013

[...] the online as separate from and lesser than the physical. Jurgenson proposes an alternative view of “augmented reality,” in which “digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.”[20] This piece [...]

Augmented Mobilization at the People’s Climate March - Treat Them Better — March 9, 2015

[…] to task many times before. Nathan Jurgenson and others have proposed in its place the notion of augmented reality—the “merging of material reality with digital information, as well as the augmentation of […]

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